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The
un-edited text from one of Jacob Holdt's workshops transcribed from
a videotape. The workshop followed the day after his presentation
of the show and will later be edited and illustrated with the drawings
he did on a blackboard in the room.
With my mentor, Dr.
Charles King, on his death bed in Atlanta.
Charles King made two day oppression workshops for city councils,
corporations, the CIA and FBI as well as university students
from
his Urban Crisis Center in Atlanta.
So, I will try
to give a description of how we become racists by starting with making
a drawing of our mind here in this society. It could be your mind
here right after having seen the show. You see, it is empty. J
But basically
this is the mind we have at birth when we are ready to be filled up
with all kinds of information from whatever society we grow up in,
the human intelligence or whatever. And all this information flows
in here in a steady stream from the outside through eyes, ears, perceptions
and so on. First from our parents, later from the whole environment
we live in. And then we try to sort it out and understand it in here.
And once we understand it as children we then store it out here in
our memory boxes, in those boxes where we feels that this bit of information
belongs in. Almost like a computer in bits of information. So in the
future when we have similar new events happening to us we can immediately
go out here and find the bits and pieces we need to solve the new
problems with in a wise way, in a logical way, in a way that make
sense. This is what is so beautiful about our human mind: our enormous
capacity for flexible thinking…..unlike a computer which can only
work in certain programmed ways. But the problem we have is that most
of us can’t do this very well because so early in our childhood we
get hurt.
The first hurt
- let me give a description of a hurt – we were two or three years
old, sitting in the living room with our mother – or father, not to
be sexist here – and there was a beautiful play or game between mother
or child and it seemed like this could go on for ever. But all of
a sudden the telephone rang and there was a disturbing message for
the mother – maybe about illness or death in the family or she might
have been fired from her job – something the child doesn’t understand.
And a few minutes after when the mother comes back deeply distressed,
in pain, in anger maybe, totally upset and angry and so on. And out
of her own anger she might now slap the child who expected this play
to continue. So what happened to us at that time? We started crying,
we got hurt. But crying was a very good reaction to this hurt. For
when we cry we somehow make sure that the information we get from
such a distress experience doesn’t jam up in here. When we cry we
can discharge our pain and still eventually sort it out - out here
in our memory boxes. But what I very soon found – especially in poor
white homes – was the tendency to slap the children or to further
hurt them once the start crying, saying "Don’t cry, don’t be
sissy, grow up and be a man". Here we see some of the roots of
sexism and also how we can eventually hardly cry as men when we grow
older. This is where the worst damage comes in: when we are punished
in the process of getting rid of our pain, then all kinds of damage
happens to us. The whole thinking machinery shuts down, we can’t process
this information, it gets stuck in here in a big tied up knot of unprocessed
information. Later in life when we have similar experiences that sort
of relate to that earlier hurtful experience we can’t now find the
bits and pieces of information out here which we need to understand
the new problems with. No, it comes up in a big tied up knot of this
unprocessed angry and emotional information. Some of us – if we have
just lost our girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever, we all know
- if you have to write a paper right after, you just can’t think clearly.
This is this whole tied up knot of hurt and pain which sort of runs
our mind there. We simply can’t think very well. And this is what
happens to everybody who has been hurt. And this is what happens to
everybody who has been hurt. The more hurt and abuse we go through,
the less well can we think in clear ways.
Talking about
racism here. All whites have been deeply hurt by racism. And when
they see the show for instance, it is not actually what is being said
in the show that is most important, but the show sort of forces of
you to think back of memories you had from childhood and messages
you got from your parents. and suddenly – something like this – a
deep hurt from childhood might come up and run your mind and therefore
I see people who are otherwise very rational and well adjusted, that
sometimes they come running out from the show, screaming and yelling
and acting weird, you know. And this is actually because they can’t
think clearly, they can’t find the pieces out here, this whole thing
in here comes up and runs their minds.
I think all of
you who have some intuitive understanding of psychology basically
knows what is going on. Here I am just trying to tie together everything
from psychology, psychiatry and whatever.
Anyway, as we
get older we get more and more hurt by all kinds of experiences in
life. And finally we become a walking, chronic distress patterns,
we can only act out in ways defined by all this hurt here. We can’t
think very well about things around us.
Americans for
instance have been deeply hurt by living in a violent society. So
they end up voting for capital punishment which other societies would
never even think of. We become rigid in our thinking. You know it
from old people, your grandparents for example when you come to their
homes and every pot plant and nip thing has to be standing exactly
there. If you move them just one inch, they get deeply upset. We loose
flexibility – a flexible mind – as we grow older when we become weird
and rigid in our ways. Young people are not so rigid so they say to
their parents or grand parents: "Look, so ridiculous and difficult
you are!" And they will defend themselves and say: "That’s
the way I am." No way. That is not the way they ARE. That
is the way they have become oppressed to BECOME.
Racism
So, anyway,
this model here we now sort of understand intuitively. Let us translate
it now to the issue of racism and when I now talk about racism, try
in your own mind to connect it to homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism
and all the other cousins we have. It is very similar. So when we
talk about how we become racists, I find it easiest to start with
those racists who seem worse than ourselves. For as you know, you
don’t even think of yourself as being racists, right?
So let’s start
with the old-fashioned bigots in the south. Have you seen "Mississippi
burning?" Good, then you know the type. How did they become that
way? Well, we know that nobody was born that way. A child in any society
is born with an open, loving mind - until we hurt it. How did they
get hurt?
Well, probably
very early in their upbringing they heard these messages or statements
from their parents like "Niggers are dirty" or "Don’t
play with those children down the road. They will stab you!"
This is totally irrational and insane information for the open-minded,
loving, zestful child we have in all societies to begin with. They
don’t understand it. Children don’t see in color or sex or sexual
preferential groups, ethnic groups or religious groups or whatever
until we hurt them like this.
"Niggers
are dirty." What does that statement really mean? Something I
noticed in all the homes I lived in was that blacks certainly wash
as much as whites do. You saw all the black homes I lived in in the
South, but whenever I got diseases like flees, craps, lice and whatever
you could catch in those days, I always got it in white homes – in
certain hippie homes they did not always wash so well J And
as for the other statement: children don’t stab. So both of these
statements are totally irrational. The child doesn’t understand them.
So when it doesn’t understand the information it receives, the thinking
machinery shuts down momentarily while it is being hurt. And all this
misinformation then jams up in here. They can’t sort it out in here.
And later as they grow older, they are now oppressed with new hurtful
information from their parents and the whole apartheid-like society
they grow up in. So gradually it ties down more and more of their
minds like you see it here. And one day when they grow up, they end
up maybe looking, sounding like and acting like the – well, you remember
this pick-up truck driver I had an interview with in the show, who
was talking about "niggers" here and "niggers there
all the time? How did he become this way? He had of course been deeply
hurt in his upbringing by being oppressed with all that information.
When he picked me up, I was standing out there on the Alabama back
roads with my sign saying: "Touring USA from Denmark." He
had no idea what I was doing in America. Well, I didn’t know myself
what I was doing in America at that time J Yet, the first question
he asked when I got into the car, was: "Are there any niggers
in Denmark?" And without even waiting for an answer, he started
rambling off these sentences about nigger, nigger, nigger…. I immediately
got my tape recorder up, because I knew that that was the voice of
history, I heard there. The sentences that had been oppressed upon
generation after generation of innocent white children growing up
in the South totally tying up their minds so they couldn’t think independently
any more. He had lost his mind to racism. There was nothing there
that had with blacks to do - I mean, me, a white person standing out
there? But any little thing could trigger this whole hurt there from
his childhood to come up and run him just like a record in a jukebox
that comes up and runs your mind with these programmed messages or
statements you have heard all your life. He couldn’t think freely
any longer. Such a person has been deeply hurt.
And if such people
have been hurt not only by racist oppression, but also by "classist"
oppression, then they are in danger. If you are growing up as poor
whites and are being told from main stream whites such as most of
you here for instance, that you are "poor white trash",
you are good for nothing, your are "bigots", you are "rednecks"
and "crackers" – all these terrible things we call poor
whites whose children of course pick it up - then they end up having
so much unhealed anger, that one day they will take their anger out
on some people in society in a more violent way by and maybe join
the Ku Klux Klan or Nazi-groups.
And what do we
do then, us who are more liberal? We FURTHER oppress them. It is obvious
that they are sick people and sick people we shouldn’t oppress or
kick around. They need help. Of course when we see them burn crosses
or shout "nigger, nigger, nigger…," we get offended. But
we don’t need to isolate them and further reject them, because it
was out of that rejection their anger grew in the first place.
So we need to
make them our allies. What does that mean? It means to constantly
in our behavior and relationship with them reach in to that human
being in here (pointing), which has not yet been destroyed. There
is such a human being in all of us. No matter how hurt we have been,
even the most violent junkie I have found that I could always on some
level reach in to.
By giving them
the attention, the love, the affection, Christian love – whatever
you will call it – which they did not receive in their upbringing,
it is so easy to help them to feel good about themselves or to feel
better about themselves. And people who feel good about themselves
have no need to go out and trash other people out there. Only people
in deep pain are able to trash other people, victimize other people.
If we can help them feel better about themselves – and that was so
easy for me as a vagabond, because I had all the time in the world
to listen to their pain and frustration and to just help them feel
that they were something by giving them recognition and asking them
questions about their childhood and so on – an interest maybe nobody
had ever shown in them before – it is so easy to help steer them away
from an otherwise destructive course. And thus we help make society
less oppressive for the target groups of their anger – the blacks,
the Jews, the women, the homosexuals and other vulnerable groups in
society. But most of us forget it and tend to further oppress them
and make them feel even worse about themselves.
Who is the greatest
oppressor in the world? Who can we think of? Hitler, yes. If we can
understand Hitler I think we can understand anybody in this world.
How did Hitler become this way? Well, Alice Miller – have any of you
read her books, the Austrian psychologist who is very famous right
now? – she has done a great study on the oppression of children and
in one of her books she writes about the oppression of Hitler in his
childhood. When you see her account of how he was beaten up and hurt
and neglected and abused by his parents – especially his father, everybody
around him – and then what happened later to him in life – you clearly
see how he was forced from being this oppressed child up here into
the role of ultimate oppressor. Any oppressor has always gone through
a severe form of oppression first and is then manipulated into the
oppressor role. But Alice Miller also says something very interesting.
If Hitler had had just one person in his childhood he could turn to
- such as a loving aunt, grandmother, a loving stranger who would
give him some love and attention – that whole process would have been
interrupted. This is what she calls "a saving angel." Most
abused children do have one such person, they can turn to. Any of
us, she says, can reach out and become saving angels toward hurt and
abused children. Right now we see a tremendous growth in America of
hurt and abused children around us and if you want to fight oppression,
you don’t wait until these people have become Ku Klux Klan members
or gangsters or criminals in the ghettos. No you reach out to them
right now and fight oppression. You do your homework by becoming "saving
angels" for those children to avoid that one day they will end
up in prison. That is in your own self-interest obviously. But most
of us, when we think of fighting oppression, we think of going out
there and shooting at the Klan or somebody like that. We simply end
up in such situations because we did not do our homework. Anyway,
this is sort of the idea of oppression – or the worst aspects of oppression,
the Ku Klux Klan, the Hitler types and so on. Most of us, however,
do not look that bad.
So let me now
talk about the more liberal form of racists and how we became that
way. Because, as I said yesterday, it was not the Ku Klux Klan who
had the great impact on blacks in America. They were shaped by the
more liberal whites. We are the ones who hold the blacks out of good
jobs, who discriminate them in health, education, housing, forcing
them into ghettos etc. The Ku Klux Klan never had that kind of power.
So it is clear that we have to work on our racism and first of all
we have to understand it. How did we become racists? Well, probably
our parents did not tell us overtly hurtful stuff like "Niggers
are dirty". They were more liberal. They would bombard us with
lofty ideals of American Creed, American liberty, equality and land
of opportunity – all these beautiful slogans all societies have up
here with the emphasis being on liberty, dignity and equality for
everyone. But whenever the topic came to inner city, slums, blacks,
homosexuals – or hitchhikers to go a step further – they would change
their tone a little bit, lift their eye brows without even knowing
it, and thereby give the hidden message to their child that some people
are not so equal as others. And this information was completely as
damaging for us and causing our thinking machinery – as we saw it
before – to shut down. When you are being told in so many words that
everybody is equal and we are all the same and so on and then you
see your own parents in so many ways send the message out to you that
some people are not so equal, you don’t understand this information.
Your whole thinking machinery shuts down, you can’t process it. This
is how we all end up racists in America.
Gunnar Myrdal,
the Swedish anthropologist who was invited over here in the 1940’s
to do a big study on American race relations, came to the conclusion
that all Americans – black or white for that matter – had these double
standards: they hold on to these lofty ideals, but deep down in their
guts they have developed the feelings that some people are not so
equal as others. And they have never been able to reconcile this gap.
So whenever we are around those people whom we basically feel are
not as equal as others, we can only act out in guilt patterns towards
them. And guilt, as blacks will tell you, is the worst form of racism.
They can’t stand patronizing attitudes. And us, who are more liberal
racists, we constantly act out in guilt patterns without even knowing
it when we are around blacks.
One example of
such a liberal racist was one white woman I had in a workshop in Smith
College. She was talking about her childhood in Washington D.C. where
there are a lot of blacks and some times her father would drive her
through the city. When she saw all those crack dealers and winos and
street people stand out there on the street corners, she would sometimes
burst out in some racist slurs. And her father – a good liberal –
would then immediately hit the brakes, turn around with a stern face
and not drive on until she had apologized. Because this was
not good tone in a liberal family to come with that kind of racist
slurs. However, years later, when she grew up and one day brought
home a black boyfriend the whole message from her father was a different
one. So all the time she had been drilled with these hidden messages
that some people are not as equal as others. And she never understood
that information. Her thinking machinery shut down and therefore she
was trying to act out her pain. All children everywhere in the world
are being oppressed. And therefore they act out their pain in so many
irrational ways in the eyes of their parents. Children are always
impossible in the eyes of their parents and they act out their pain
in so many ways. And for her it came out – at least on a racial level
– in these racist slurs.
Well, how many
of you have been blasted drunk? I am sure most of you have. Then you
also know - if you were really blasted drunk - how many of you then
had racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, sexist slurs on your lips at
least. You are very good liberals. So you have probably learned very
well how to control that unhealed anger and never let it come out
in the open - certainly not in a university atmosphere – but you know
that you have such slurs on your lips. And that basically shows how
close we are to the Ku Klux Klan. It is completely the same unhealed
anger we are trying to get out of our system.
Most campuses
I go to these days have had recent racist, sexist, homophobic and
anti-Semitic attacks. Most of us who see those things such as written
on toilet doors, we get a little offended and we tend to isolate such
people. But here again, as I said earlier, don’t ever isolate such
people who are victimizing others. For sure, it is not very nice to
see, but they are not very different from you. Reach out. Give them
your friendship, your help. Don’t necessarily talk about the issues
which are burdening them, but give them all the love you can and thereby
help them to feel better about themselves. Because, as I said before,
people who feel good about themselves have no need to go out and victimize
and trash others. So it is something I feel we should never forget
on any campus; that you can help make campus a less oppressive place
to be for the minorities if you end up reaching out to the racists,
the sexists, the homophobes or whatever we have around. We are all
in deep pain. And this pain has been growing in society the last ten
years I have noticed. And therefore we now see a tremendous rise in
racist attacks all over the place.
Anyway, I will
now get to the oppression of black children. But let us for a minute
sum it all up. Whether we grow up old-fashioned bigots or we go through
the liberal racism which most of us went through, the damage is pretty
much the same. And some people who work on these issues have come
to the conclusion that maybe as a result of all this oppression we
only have 10% left of our original intelligence to operate with on
a functional way. The rest is tied down in these hurt- and anger patterns.
We can’t think very well as a result. And this is for the successful
adult whites in America. That might include many of you in here. You
might not have more than 10% left to operate with. We know that a
lot of poor whites are in deep pain. We see them constantly end up
in fights where – in the same situation – we can walk in and never
get into any fights. Such people have a hard time making it into fine
schools like Kenyon College. They are in deep pain. We are talking
here about hurt intellect.
So let me now
talk about the oppression of black children in this society. Here
the damage is far worse, of course. For they go through a double form
of racism. The first one they get is the easiest one to understand,
the overt racism. We now understand what that is. That is the unhealed
anger from us they constantly perceive and feel around wherever they
go, the guilt and fear patterns they feel from you on campuses such
as this, the statements they hear and see written around and so on.
All black children very early perceive that from society. They grow
up on the wrong side of the tracks in the south. From day one they
know that everything about them is wrong when they see themselves
growing up in dilapidated housing and see whites living over there
in nice homes and see the hostile glares of whites when they walk
into the downtown sections of town and so on. Or they grow up on the
south side of Chicago and see millions of blacks around them – never
a white face – until they turn on the TV and they realize whites are
all over in power in this society here. This is deeply damaging for
the self-esteem of a black child growing up.
But that more
overt racism is not necessarily the worst nowadays. No, there is another
more vicious aspect to it called "internalized racism."
What is that? Let me try to illustrate it: wherever in the world we
have a group being oppressed, the members of that group will then
further internalize the views of their oppressors and help to further
drag each other down in oppression, hurt each other and instill these
values in each other. Women know it all very well. As a result of
sexist oppression women everywhere in the world are the best examples
of people telling each other that the woman’s place is in the home,
in the kitchen and don’t take male power in society. We have millions
of Phyllis Schlafly’s anywhere in the world, further dragging women
down in sexist oppression. Let me give some similar examples from
internalized racism. One thing I noticed everywhere in the underclass
homes when I saw fights among adults was that they would scream things
like "You ain’t shit, nigger!" which immediately is perceived
by the black child. In other words they constantly hear from early
childhood "You are worse than dirt" – reverberating white
society’s low opinions of them.
Or for black
students who go to elite schools like this on here, it is very painful
and difficult to adjust to all this white power all of a sudden if
you have been shaped by a ghetto environment or black culture. And
a lot of black students are not capable of adjusting to it – especially
since they don’t get your help. So the black attrition rate in these
integrated schools is enormous. But if they are capable of adjusting
to these white institutions here, they are often - when they come
home to their homes such as in the ghettos – ridiculed for now acting
white, thinking whites and being called "oreo cookies."
I don’t know if you saw Spike Lee’s "School days"? That
is a classic example of internalized racism showing how blacks end
up hurting fellow blacks who go to these schools. A very sad example
I had in Baltimore recently when a black student was telling me how
his girlfriend had just been accepted into an elite school. She had
been given a big scholarship. When time came to start school, she
now found out that her mother had now spent all the money on herself.
When she confronted her mother since she now felt her whole future
was denied her, the mother snapped back at her and said "You
shouldn’t go to that white school anyway. You should be proud of your
own people. You should stay close to home and your roots." A
very sad example of how you end up hurting fellow blacks and dragging
yourself down in further racist oppression.
I hope you now
see the model here. We have thousands of examples and we see them
similar in every oppressed group in the world. One classical example
of it among blacks is the game called "playing the dozens."
Have you ever heard about this? Some of you have. They call it different
things in different cities in America. I was just in New York where
they call in "snapping." It is a game where young blacks
– and they still do it all over this country – will stand for hours
insulting each other, hurting each other, humiliating each other,
attacking family members. That is where the term "motherfucker"
comes from. And then the game is to "stay cool" – not to
get upset or angry – or you would immediately loose the game. Why
basically are they trying to hurt each other like that? Well, this
is something sociologists have traced back to slavery, in the need
of black mothers at that time to hurt and humiliate especially their
male children to prepare them for a life in slavery, to make sure
that they would never make rebellion against the slave master because
that could get them instantly killed or punished. In other words,
it was a survival measure at the time. But it doesn’t serve that function
any longer. It has been deeply internalized among blacks. And the
fact that these traits of internalized racism continues 127 years
after slavery ended is the best proof we have that slavery never ended
in this society. Because these traits we do not see to nearly that
extent in other ex-slave-societies. I will get back to that in a second
and you will see it clearly.
Let me now put
an estimate on the loss of black intelligence in this society. And
while I talk about this, don’t forget for one minute, that this is
not scientific stuff. It is just one way to let you understand something
most of you never really understood. How shall I phrase this?
Well, you’re all very liberal here, right? Some of you will have doubts
about me saying this, but basically you’re fairly liberal compared
to the rest of society. Yet, deep down you have developed many of
the same gut feelings about blacks – that somehow because of some
inherent deficiency they can’t make it in the school system. And that’s
why you see so few blacks around you in this school etc. You are fighting
these feelings through guilt, but you have them nevertheless. You
have heard from many of your grandparents all these stories such as
"my ancestors came over here dirt poor from this or that country,
Poland, Ireland etc, and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
So why can’t they?" – talking about the people in the ghettos.
And you were more liberal, so you got angry when you heard that kind
of stuff. You started defending blacks and said that that was because
of something in slavery and so on. But basically you didn’t have a
good answer at the time. So again it added to your anger and guilt
around this whole issue. But I will give you some good explanation
now which you can use the next time you meet your grandfather. Because
let us now put an estimate on the loss of the black intelligence in
this society in relationship to the loss of the white one. As I said,
blacks have gone through a much more severe form of oppression, totally
being stripped of self-esteem and hope for their own futures. So I
will say that maybe as a result of all this oppression – overt racism
as well as internalized racism – the blacks growing up in this society
might only have 5% left to operate with in a functional way of the
vast intelligence we are all given at birth. The rest is tied down
in all these anger patterns (pointing) ….similar to those I hope you
left with at the end of the show yesterday.
Why am I saying
5% here? Because – and it is only one way of measuring it - it reflects
the overall success rate of blacks in this society for centuries.
Look at this here. This is the white median family income in America.
Here we just put it at 100%. How much are blacks now making in relationship
to that? Do any of you know?
- Around 55%.
- Yes, it is
probably close to that now. This here is what the census bureau says,
56%. And this is the only reason I say half over here on the diagram.
There is not necessarily any correlation. This was much higher when
I first came to America. It was 63%. Blacks are now rapidly falling
behind with about one percentage point a year. Basically this was
the same share they had during slavery. At that time they didn’t receive
money, but food, clothes, housing and so on and since most whites
were poor then, economists have concluded that blacks pretty much
had half the living standard of whites. In other words: for centuries
there has been no progress for blacks in this society here – economically
speaking. We know politically there has been tremendous progress.
We now see black mayors all over the place, but economically speaking
we see no progress. So what does that do to our thinking? Century
after century? When you hear about all these other immigrant groups,
who come over here and immediately make it, you think back on your
grandfather’s talk. And deep down therefore you can only come to one
conclusion: that somehow for some inherent deficiency in blacks they
can’t make it. Right?
You are going
to be very quiet right now because you know you all feel all this
deep down. I have been traveling enough in America to know that whites
think that way. And it gives you tremendous quilt because you want
so badly to hold on to all these lofty ideals up here about how we
are all equal and so on. So this makes you despair because we want
to see that we are all equal, we want that. We are not bad racists,
we do not want to hold blacks back. Some older generations might have
wanted that, but basically we want them to BE like Bill Cossby. It
is a dream world we would to come true. So we despair when we see
this relationship (pointing) between blacks and whites century after
century.
And therefore
I will now try to give you some hope. And the hope we get when we
start looking at those blacks who are making it. Who could that be?
- Entertainers?
- Well, yes,
like Bill Cosby. They are making it, but basically they belong to
the same group here making an average of 56% of white income – the
average of Bill Cosby way up here and the underclass deep down here.
Bill Cosby is so rich that he could donate 20 million dollars to Spellman
College.
So let me now
ask the question in a different way. Who are those blacks who are
making it because they have not been shaped by our racism? Who could
they be?
Well, we are
in Ohio so you may not know…..now I gave you a hint.
- People coming
from other societies…..?
- Right! If they
have not been shaped by our racism, they have to come from other societies,
because all blacks in this society have been deeply shaped by our
racism. All women in this society have been deeply shaped by our sexism.
There is no way they could avoid it.
So I am especially
talking about those blacks who came from the Caribbean, West Indian
blacks. How well are they doing economically in relationship to this
whole thing here on the blackboard? You don’t know? Well, they make
up 94% of white median family income. Now, when we look at this here,
don’t forget that 1% of whites – the Rockefellers, Bill Gates and
that type of people – own and control 30-40% of the wealth in this
society. Most of those people did not work their own way up in these
high positions. They inherited their wealth. So if we allow ourselves
to take away for a minute that 1% of whites, who did not work their
own way up, you will find that West Indian blacks are completely on
the level of whites in this society. And they all worked their own
way up from poverty. Nothing was given to them.
And this figure
here of 94% includes the recent boat refugees from Haiti coming here
from one of the poorest, most illiterate and oppressive societies
on earth. The minute they are in America – or at least a generation
after – they are up in the middle class….to the astonishment of native
American blacks in say Miami and Liberty City. They don’t understand
"how can they do it when we can’t?"
This is what
we have to try to understand here: why is it so easy for foreign blacks
who come here to "make it up the latter" and not for American
blacks?
Most West Indian
blacks are living in the area from Washington DC, New York, Hartford
and up to Boston. Almost all of the top black positions you see in
that area – or a great majority - are held by West Indian blacks.
Some of them you also know nationwide such as Shirley Chisholm, Harry
Belafonte, Colin Powell – the chief of our armed forces right now,
are West Indian blacks. Republicans have no problems getting along
with West Indian blacks. They don’t get along very well with American/native
blacks.
Well, a lot of
the West Indian blacks live in Brooklyn I New York and if you as a
white person walk in there, you immediately feel that – even though
everybody is blacks it seems like you are in some Italian, Polish
or Irish neighborhood: you see clean streets, thriving business, hardly
anybody on welfare, prod home ownership – West Indians are staunchly
opposed to welfare – and more young people in college than are in
prison. But then you walk into the native American black areas in
Harlem, Bronx or other parts of New York. Then you immediately see
the stereotypical white racist ghetto image we have in our white mind….of
dirty streets, broken glass and litter in the streets, burned out
stores. In many ghettos I go to these days, like Detroit, almost the
only stores left in the ghetto are owned by outsiders. Up to 40% are
on welfare and more young people are in prison than are in college.
Now we start understanding the tremendous damage we are inflicting
on American blacks.
So you see now
that what we are talking about has nothing to do with race. For those
blacks from the West Indies came from the same tribes in Africa as
American blacks, they went through the same type of slavery - namely
the Anglo-Saxon form of slavery which was vicious. But there was one
important difference. And what was that difference? That their
slavery ended 120 years ago, it never ended in America!
What happened
after slavery ended in the West Indies was that most of the whites
left the islands. So from now on the blacks could start recoup all
that which was stripped from them in slavery, dignity, self-reliance,
pride and so on which the American black has never been allowed to
recoup again. Plus they started seeing black role models all over
in their societies and that is extremely important for the motivation
of black children. So when - a century later - they come into this
very racist society in America you can say that they come here as
recovered human beings. And even though this is a very racist
society they somehow can now use it as a vehicle for success. It doesn’t
seem to hold them back. Talking about the Haitians for instance, you
have heard all this rhetoric from your parents about the "white
protestant work ethic", right? It is almost a slogan in
this country. Well, then you have apparently never heard about "the
black catholic work ethic" – that of Haitians coming here and
holding two or three jobs at the same time while going to school at
night. That is of course the way they make it.
- I don’t ask
this to be skeptical…
- Well, you are
supposed to be skeptical. We are in a university….
- Why do you
suppose then that Haiti and the Dominican Republic and stuff like
that with the absence of white people are still so poor?
- Well, simply
because they belong to the Third World. Whether those countries are
white or black in Latin America they are part of the whole colonial
era we ended up with of poverty. So they are trapped in a totally
different system of colonialism and neo-colonialism. But let us talk
about that on another occasion.
Let us now look
at something interesting here. One thing I have noticed is that there
often is a deep division between West Indian blacks and native American
blacks in the American black community or ghettos. Are there any from
New York here? Or Hartford? Because then you would know a little bit
about this. For of course those blacks for whom success came fairly
easy for – relatively speaking – don’t understand American blacks
very well. So they start thinking of American blacks often in very
much the same racist way as we do, thinking of them as "lazy",
"unmotivated", "criminal" etc. Therefore you see
a strong clash between them in the ghettos. In Hartford any of my
native black American friends call the West Indians for "go getters"
or even "black Jews." Interesting, right?
Anti-Semitism
How many
of you are Jews here? Well, that is not many here in Ohio. But let’s
just play on anti-Semitism here for a second to get a better understand
of this. "Black Jews" – what does that mean? Here we are
playing on the notion that Jews are successful in business because
West Indians own and control most of the business in the black ghetto
in Hartford. Also in New York City you see this. Whenever you walk
into banks in New York and see black employees, try to go up and ask
them if they are from the West Indies….and you will see that it is
almost always the case. They are very successful in the financial
world. So you see we are here really playing on anti-Semitism, the
notion we all have in our thinking that "Jews are successful
in business".
So what happened
to the Jews over the last 2000 years? Well, during that time they
were forced to flee into foreign countries. Often they were invited
by the kings, the rulers or whatever dictators we had in those societies
to make up an entering wedge between the rulers up here (showing on
graph) and the masses down here. A low level anti-Semitic propaganda
was kept alive all the time so if rebellion suddenly broke out in
the masses against the rulers up here, they could manipulate the anger
of the masses out against the Jews instead of against the real oppressors
in society. And thus the Jews were forced into pogroms or Holocaust
or forced to flee into new countries. We know the whole sad and vicious
history they went through. Then the rulers in the new countries often
invited them in order to recycle and abuse them the same way as entering
wedges. Often the only jobs they were allowed to hold in those days
were in the financial world. That is why that whole anti-Semitic
notion came from.
But throughout
the whole oppression the Jews were somehow capable of escaping the
worst aspects of gentile oppression. They came from a strong cultural
background, so they could somehow tell their children that "you
are better than your gentile oppressors, but this is a vicious anti-Semitic
society. So you must work twice as hard as everybody else to make
it" all the time. They were able to do that by pushing their
children with all kinds of techniques such as "Jewish guilt"
and whatever. Some of you who are Jewish knows exactly what that means,
right!"
And this is very
similar to what happens to West Indian blacks. They come in here to
a very racist society and almost use racism as a vehicle for success.
They tell their children that "you can do it, but you must work
twice as hard as everybody else." And therefore they can do it
and continually make it. One way they especially do it is through
education.
And now you are
going to see something very interesting here. How many blacks are
there in America? You should know that....well, you are waiting for
the census statistics to come out any day now. Well, the answer is
30 million this year. Last year it was 29 million. How many of those
are West Indian blacks? That I am sure you don't know. Approximately
600.000. So in other words, what is their percentage of the total
blacks?.....(calculating) I was thrown out of high school, I am not
good at math....
- 2%
Great. They only make up two percent of the black population in America.
But one thing both I and Tony Harris got astonished by very soon when
we started touring in America in the most elitist schools, we soon
found that up to 85% of the black students in these very competitive
schools - where the SAT scores are very high - are of West Indian
descent - or have one parent who is West Indian. Talking previously
about "a saving angle" it seems to make a difference for
the child if one of the parents are West Indian. They make up only
2% of the black population out there and yet are so overrepresented
in higher education.
So that raises
the question: what are we whites doing to our native American blacks
to so effectively screen them away from a good education in this society
and thus from high paying jobs and positions? Why can't average American
blacks easily make it into Harvard, Yale, Stanford etc when it is
so easy for blacks from other countries to do it? This is the damage
racism is inflicting on American blacks. And until this minute most
of you had learned very effectively to blame the victim for failing
in this process. You all knew this was happening, but somehow you
just found all these rationalizations for it - that this was due to
some inherent inferiority in blacks and so on. But this is entirely
the result of OUR oppression. You now understand that this has nothing
to do with race or skin color, for West Indians are even blacker than
American blacks since they were not so mixed up with your white forefathers.
So therefore
what we see in this society is generally this: black and white children
enter pretty much on the same level in first grade in the school system.
On the average whites make it in such a straight line (drawing on
blackboard) up to college. But black America children start getting
affected by internalized racism - believing our negative thinking
of them - very early. And after 4th grade it starts showing - they
start distrusting themselves, doubt their own futures and gradually
loose their motivation - and therefore they start falling behind in
the school system. They turn inattentive, turn off and often become
hostile the more they loose hope. That lack of hope is so devastating.
If you have no hope, there is no way you are ever going to make it.
So after 4th grade they fall behind whites. And then this become a
self-increasing process, they fall further and further behind the
whites and immigrants. And by the time they should make it into college
- not to speak of Ivy League schools - they are so far behind that
there is no way the great majority of them can get accepted. They
have long ago learned to live with the street and therefore end up
in greater numbers in prison than in college. And this is a worsening
oppressive pattern these years. When I first came to America in the
70'es there were more blacks in college than in prison. Now it is
just the reverse!
West Indian blacks
apparently follow this white line all the way up. They have no problems.
What you see here is the curve of oppression we have in all societies.
Wherever we have segregation between races or groups combined with
oppression, you will find that the group being oppressed tend to fall
behind in the educational system. In Israel we see it between Sephardic
and European Jews or between Jews and Palestinians - even though Palestinians
make up much of the academic elite in the Arab world, in Malaysia
between Chinese and bumiputhras. In Denmark where I am from you see
it between the Danes and the Muslim immigrant children etc. Everywhere
where we see oppression this tends to be the case. Yet, all Americans
have somehow learned to see and think of this in a purely blame-the-victim
light - never ever to see it as a result of their own oppressive sides!
You have a question....
- Even though West Indians haven't internalized racism, it is hard
to understand they can follow that white line. They must encounter
external forms of racism.....
- Yes, but they don't seem to get defeated by it since it doesn't
re-stimulate some patterns learned very early from their own kind.
Here we make rough sweeping generalizations, because I personally
know quite a few West Indian blacks who are certainly also affected
by racism. But somehow economically - on the average - they are still
up here. And actually - since they are included in this figure here
of 56% because the census bureau lumps everyone calling themselves
"negro" together - American blacks are even further down
on this scale. Because this figure has been pulled up by the successful
West Indian blacks who are almost twice as well off - economically
speaking. But the interesting thing is, that even though they have
lived here for two or three or four generations they seem to maintain
their wide economic gap down to American blacks by not getting devastated
by all this racism. Who really understands all this? I certainly don't.
I wish more studies had been done on it. And the interesting thing
is also that it seems to be the case - as I mentioned before - that
if just one parent is West Indian, that is enough to give the children
that extra push. American blacks - allowing ourselves to generalize
again - cannot effectively push their children because they have very
little expectations of them to begin with - having never had any hope
for themselves for the most part. It is very hard to tell your children
that "you can make it" if basically deepest down you feel
that they can't make it. I will get back to this in a second, because
we also have reverse situations where blacks are on top and whites
fall behind.
- Do you have
any information from your personal experience about those 2% of blacks
whom you mentioned are in intermarriages, whether the majority of
those marrying whites are Caribbean blacks or native American blacks?
- Absolutely,
yes. The intermarriage rate is much higher among West Indian blacks
- mainly because they seem much more similar to white culture. When
you are shaped by a different society it is much easier to fit in
on the white side of the apartheid system in America. So again this
has nothing to do with race. Actually I will get back to this later.
Because now I will take you on a little foreign journey to show you
how damaged we really have become in this society. We are deeply damaged.
Whether we grew up white or black, all of us were crippled to various
degrees. It is easier to see yourself when you see yourself from the
outside.
So what I am
going to do now is to take you to a country where blacks are making
it and whites are falling behind. Have you any idea what that country
could be? You have heard a lot about affirmative action and so-called
"reverse discrimination" in this country, but have you ever
seen any examples of reverse discrimination? Well, if this had been
a lesser competitive school with a lot of poorer whites in it, I would
have seen an army of hands now.....for they can always come up with
some examples of some whites who have been discriminated against in
order to hire a less qualified black....
No, of course,
you can't have reverse discrimination in a country where whites are
solidly on top everywhere. It is impossible to reversely discriminate
against whites here. But we do have such a situation down in Costa
Rica. I have to ask you if you know where that is since Americans
have so little knowledge of geography. Well, in this school you probably
do know. In the 1870'es - after slavery ended in the West Indies,
Trinidad and Barbados - the freed slaves came over to work for the
United Fruit on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica. Little by little
they started buying up small plots of land and by the 1930'es many
of them had become fairly affluent landowners. At that time we saw
a migration of poor whites up from the highlands of Costa Rica to
look for work out there in the Limon province. So suddenly we see
a reverse situation in which black employers are giving work to poor
whites. That is something you almost never see in the USA. And once
such a system of oppression has been set up it tends to get worse
just like we have seen it in America between blacks and whites. So
what you see there now today is something which has really astonished
anthropologists. I went down there myself. When you sit around with
these affluent, cultured and extremely conservative blacks and listen
to what they are saying - well, listen to what they are saying about
those poor whites, they have to hire: "When I meet two whites
at night, I immediately cross over to the other side of the street."
or "Whites are prone to violence, whites carry knives, whites
will backstab you. Don't ever trust whites." or the best one
is "Whites are oversexed. Whites have got too much sexual drive."
......Some of you were smiling when you heard me say this and that
actually shows how racist you are, to what degree you have internalized
the reverse stereotypes about a deeply hurt people here in this country.
But what happens to the poor white children in that society down there,
who are forced to internalize all these negative perceptions of them.
Well, they fall behind in the school system. The blacks often make
it up to university, the whites don't make it, fall behind, stay back
on the plantations or go to prison. As I said, once a system of oppression
has been established, it tends to get worse and worse. The blacks
have now become so rich that they do the same as the rich all over
Latin America. They send their children to be educated in the United
States and quite a few of them will then come up and tell me about
this when they see my workshop. So I know how many of them are actually
here in this country, where they become part of the successful West
Indian community. In fact, you can hardly any longer see this reverse
relationship in Costa Rica because most of these rich blacks end up
staying in the USA after studying here
Come to think of it, you know that a lot of these private small liberal
arts colleges, such as this one, every year they fly out to the Caribbean
to recruit what they call "qualified blacks". Don't forget
that out in those countries there are only a total of perhaps 5 million
blacks. But out of 30 million American blacks these elitist schools
in America can't find enough of "qualified blacks." So you
see the problem we have in this country by putting so much devastation
on American blacks. So some of those they recruit out there are from
Costa Rica.
Well, if you
ask black parents in Costa Rica "What do you hope for your children?"
they will usually answer something like "I hope my son will become
a lawyer, a doctor etc." If you ask white parents, they
will usually say something like "I hope they will survive."
This, you see, is the complete reverse of parent expectation in America.
So this is a system of reverse oppression and it is so important that
we understand this is also possible because I want you to never think
of this in racial terms any longer. Only in terms of oppression.
So let us look
at ourselves for a minute. Until now we did the same mistake as the
frog sitting in the bottom of the well here (showing a ring). We looked
up at the sky up there and concluded: "The sky is no bigger than
the opening of the well." We had no better information
in this society, so we came to the conclusion that "this is the
way blacks are, this is the way whites are and so on." But what
I just did here was to show you a little bit of the sky which was
denied you in your upbringing. That is why I can never blame any American
for being racist. For they had no better information. How could they
avoid becoming racist?
Anyway, this
reverse model is of course just as unhealthy a society as the American
model of racism. So let me now show you another Caribbean society
where blacks and whites tend to come out more evenly. Has any of you
any idea where that is?
- Cuba?
Yes, but it has
nothing to do with communism. And I need to say this since for you
Americans Cuba always stands for only communism. What I am talking
about here started long before Castro. Namely in the Latin form of
slavery experience blacks went through there. Just like in Brazil.
What happened in the Latin form of slavery was that the catholic church
stood between the master and the slave and protected the slave family
from being sold away and broken up, executed and so on. In other words,
from the beginning there was some kind of psychological escape for
the slave. They were defined as human beings. In America they were
solidly defined as property, as things you could destroy and execute
and sell away. In my opinion this has never completely left the American
awareness. So out of that came a totally different post-slavery society
in Cuba. And that we felt - my son sitting there went with me to Cuba
- we felt the minute we went down the streets in Havana. Every group
of persons we saw of let's say more than 5 people would be totally
integrated white and black. Every neighborhood was totally integrated.
There were none - or at least seemed to be none - of these guilt-fear-tangles
in the white mind we know so well from all American whites and none
of the anger-hostility-patterns, we know from American blacks. They
got along completely like this (demonstrating with folded fingers).
In fact - two
summers ago a Cuban black was translating my show into Spanish. And
afterwards he then asked me "Shouldn't I do the narration also?"
And then I - with all my American racism - said: "No, you can't
do that, because I have made my show for whites and I say "we
whites" all the time in the show. And people can of course hear
that you have a black accent."
"No, no", he said, "not in Cuba. There is no detectable
speech or behavior gab between whites and blacks in Cuba. You can't
tell on the radio who is black and who is white."
You know, in
America, as racism lessened up until 1975, the gap between inner city
black and suburban white speech was gradually reduced. But after 1975,
when racism started get worse in America again, black speech now became
more different from white speech, studies show. So we grew more and
more different from each other again. So in other words, the more
oppression you have in society, the more the people you oppress become
different from yourself. This is something we know from anti-Semitism
also. Back in old Russia and Eastern Europe the Jews were extremely
different from the gentile population. Anybody could tell a Jew on
a miles' distance. In this country here we can hardly tell the difference
from a Jew and a gentile any longer. Anti-Semitism is so much less
here and therefore we become so much more alike each other. And this
is also answering your question earlier: once you have not so much
oppression, then we of course become all "mainstream". I
hate to say "white", so let's say mainstream in whatever
society we are living in.
So are the implications
of this? Well, I went to the hospitals in Cuba and checked with
doctors and nurses and found this out. That blacks do not have a higher
incidence of high blood pressure rates in Cuba than whites do. You
know, this is the case in America due to stress, tension, anger, racism,
self-destructive eating habits among blacks, they suffer a tremendously
high incidence of high blood pressure rate which kills them much faster
than whites. But that was not the case in Cuba.
So with this
knowledge I went to the universities and found out that blacks and
whites enter in the same proportion in the first grade as they come
out on the university level. There was nobody falling behind like
we see it in America. There were no affirmative action programs, test
were written so that you cannot tell who is black and who is white.
Wow, that was
choking news to me! Why? Well, one thing I have noticed. When
I get letters from many of my poor black friends in America I am astonished
to how bad they often write. The oppressed mind cannot verbalize itself
very well in written form. Again something we noticed if we went to
integrated school.......and we blamed the victim for that. But why
was I choked? Shouldn't I have known all this? Of course I should.
I have learned a lot about oppression in this society, but no matter
how much you know about oppression, no matter how liberal you are
in your thinking - I could explain all of this to anybody in my travels
at least here in more recent years - after all it took me some years
to understand all this. But if you live as long as I have in a society
like America where all you see around you - on the average - is this
black defeat, black failure rate, then deep down in your guts you
do the same as all other white and black Americans do. You start developing
these lingering fears or feelings, that somehow because of some inherent
deficiency in blacks they can't make it - no matter how much you intellectually
understand about oppression. And suddenly when I came to a society
which at least on that level was free I realized how racist I had
become in America.....by seeing my own chock when I was told that
the blacks are not falling behind there, have no problems writing
or verbalizing themselves. Gee, that is a scary discovery, because
I knew very well, that if you have that type of racism in you where
you somehow deepest down expect a group to fail, well, then you can
rest assured that you are going to - in your everyday behavior, your
signals, the messages you send out to black children in that society
- send them the crushing message "You are not going to make it
in this society" And they are going to pick up those messages
and therefore they internalize them and don't make it. We know it
from teachers everywhere in the world: the expectations a teacher
has of a child is the image the child adopts of itself and therefore
becomes as a result of that oppression. Everywhere in the world we
see that.
So
through my racism I had helped to force millions of blacks into ghettos
and therefore ultimately into prison in this society. I promised myself
then never again to blame any Ku Klux Klan person for that process.
It is so important that we understand our own racism and responsibility
and this is not easy before you compare with other societies.
Tape
change: Missing "Is there any racism left?"
We
will get back and talk more generally about all this in the end, but
what I am here trying to do is through a serious of arguments to come
to a heightened awareness and understand of these problems and then
it is easier to talk about it in the end.
I
will now just go to another Caribbean country for a second. Two years
ago I went to Jamaica and what very soon interested me there was not
so much the Jamaicans - they were certainly beautiful people - but
how we as whites react to them. What I very soon found in Jamaica
is that it is a very popular tourist spot - especially for racist
whites. How many of you have been to Jamaica, for instance? :-) ......Ok,
now you don't dare to say it. (laughter).
What I constantly ran into was what I would here call "bigots"
from Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and such places who would go there
two or three times a year and have lot's of black friends. They just
loved the place. But when I asked them: "How do you get along
with blacks at home in America?" they would usually burst out
in anger and say things like: "I hate them, I dislike them, they
have got a chip on their shoulders!"
This again shows our enormous capacity for blaming the victim when
we don't understand what goes wrong between us. We know that things
are totally out of hands between blacks and whites in America and
therefore in our thinking we always blame them for it.
But
actually this shows us some hope. What is the hope? Any foreigner
who comes into America and sees blacks solidly locked up in ghettos
almost everywhere in the country would come to the conclusion: "White
Americans must be evil or bad people. Why else do they lock blacks
up like this?" No way, we are not bad people and we don't
really dislike blacks. The hope we get here lies in the fact that
we want to go to Jamaica to make friends with blacks. So we don't
really dislike blacks. What we dislike are the people we have hurt
with our racism. Nobody said it better than Tacitus: "It is human
nature to hate the one you have hurt." We have hurt the
American black intensely and therefore we end up disliking so many
aspects in black Americans. At the same time we want to hold on to
our liberal ideas up here (pointing) and out of our guilt we then
go to societies where we can somehow get along with blacks because
we have not shaped them with our racism to alleviate our guilt. Very
important.
The
fear patterns I also observed in white Americans going to Jamaica.
Remember that we earlier talked about the guilt-fear tangle in the
white mind defining modern racism. I talked to quite a few white American
women who traveled all over in this black island of Jamaica - even
hitchhiking around. But when I asked them: "Would you ever walk
down the streets in New York or Los Angeles at night?"
No way would they. We fear those we have hurt. And the fear is so
intense that we can't separate valid fears from invalid fears.
And
therefore I will just talk a bit about those fears, because we can't
talk about racism in America without addressing the white fear of
crime, the white fear of blacks. It is very hard to talk about this
since we have all in so many ways been hurt by crime. So what I will
do here for a little while - without taking questions on this - is
to describe a white woman I had in a workshop. And then through her
reaction try all of you to test your own reaction to see how racist
you are, when I talk about her now. She had grown up in Iowa in a
place where she had hardly ever met in blacks and therefore she didn't
think she was racist. Well, as we now have learned, you grow up racist
no matter where you grow up in America. The media and everything around
you will make sure that you end up giving into racism. One day she
went to New York and did the classical mistake of people coming from
the Midwest. She got on the subway and off at the so-called wrong
stop. So all of a sudden she was in Harlem of all places. And I think
it was even in broad daylight. She then described the feeling she
had when she walked out there in a totally black environment. She
was totally paralyzed with fear - all kinds of weird emotions came
up in her - and she kept using the word sickness about how she felt
and even started vomiting. Here we see just how sick the white mind
is......just from being in a slightly different place in America an
otherwise totally healthy, bright student start reacting like this.
Did she have any valid reason to feel like this? No, no, basically
not. What whites have never realized is that whites are far safer
in black areas than whites are. Everywhere in the world we see that
the oppressed people take their anger out more readily on each other
than on their perceived oppressor. I very soon realized that in my
travels and therefore felt safe in black areas for the most part.
Well, some of you are not totally convinced about this. So let me
also say that especially when you see these affluent Ivy League type
of institutions like Columbia, Yale, Univ. of Penn, Univ. of Chicago
and John Hopkins Medical School smack right up in the middle of a
black ghetto, then you will see some hostility against white students
there. It seems like such an affront with these contrasts there. But
generally what happens to a white student walking into a solidly black
neighborhood in America is that they are totally safe. Some blacks
will come up and offer them protection, because they have internalized
all this white fear about each other. That is more likely than somebody
victimizing you.
So why did this white woman react like this? Was it the blacks who
were out to stab or rape her? No, it was her own parents who were
out to stab her with the messages she had deep down had about blacks
ever since childhood. and which made her incapable of acting in a
human way in such a neighborhood. And if you end up sending these
guilt-fear vibrations to people, yes, then you might meet some hostility
and be more vulnerable than a healthy person walking in there.
But
I will now give you another description of this situation so you can
better see that this is the case. Up in Cornell University every year
I do this show for freshman orientation and usually it is the black
students who are organizing it. So they put me up in the black dormitories
called "Ujamaa." And one day all the black students had
a big meeting there and they invited me to be an observer. I decided
to take one of my white friends with me who had worked on getting
rid of her racism for two years. I felt she was somewhat healthy.
But she later told me that when she walked into that room of only
black students there, she felt totally "frozen". She felt
guilt and resentment and fear.....all kinds of weird feelings
came up and controlled her - literally paralyzing her. But what struck
me was that her words were almost completely similar to the words
of the woman walking into Harlem. She was incapable of functioning
in that totally black environment. Everywhere in America I hear from
black students that if they are just three black male students in
a classroom and a white student happen to walk in, that student very
soon easy his way out again.
Talking
about the white woman who walked into Harlem, you see that it was
the same feelings these two women had when walking into these two
situations. But no sane American is going to tell me that any rational
white person has any reason to be afraid of black Ivy League students.
It is just ridiculous. Yet it was the same feelings of fear that paralyzed
both of them. So that is why I say that we can separate valid fears
from invalid fears when it comes to racism. We have been so deeply
hurt and mistreated in our upbringing that any black man is going
to immediately strike up fear in us.
-
Well, I can see your point. But just look at the statistics and the
number of criminals. They are certainly biased against blacks. And
that is what we hear about, the crime.
-
Well, I am not blind to that fact. I was held up at gunpoint 4 times
by some young blacks. Luckily it was one of my first experiences I
had in America. But even more luckily I had already been through a
different experience first since the first American home I lived
in was a black home. The minute I came to this country I was invited
in to a black home on the Southside of Chicago. And that was so important,
I understand today. Most white Europeans who come to America hear
these things from whites: "Don't walk two blocks this way or
three blocks that way and that is how we cripple them with fear so
they can never have a healthy relationship to blacks ever after.
It
is true that there is a disproportional rate of crime among blacks,
but don't forget that the vast majority of that is black on black
as a result of all this anger and self-hatred we looked at over here
before. It does strike fear in us, but only 5% of all crime in America
is interracial. And that includes white on black crime.
But all I am really saying here is that you can't separate valid fears
from invalid fears and therefore we just project our fears out on
all blacks all the time. And this in itself is causing a lot of crime.
Let's take for instance a black man who has taken two or three Ph.D's.
But the minute he puts on blue jeans and walks through white suburbia,
no matter how many ph.d's he has taken, all your fears are immedeately
locking him up in a ghetto causing anger. Or the same person who is
trying to flag down a taxi in NYC or Washington DC and who stands out
there for hours unable to get a cab ride. Now this is creating so much
anger in young blacks that a lot of young don't give a damn eventually
and they go out and create crime almost as if trying to live up to the
image we expect of them. So I am just saying that our fears in themselves
are causing a lot of crime.
That workshop in Smith College where I
had the white woman from Iowa, whom we talked about before, I had two
Danish friends with me. And it was so funny, just the night before I had
just picked them up in JFK - I get so tired of all this driving in
America, so I often invite Danes with me to help drive. To avoid that
they would get a jet-lag I took them out bar hopping to keep them awake
as late as possible. I forgot to tell them where I was going since I
usually live in Harlem, when I am around, and therefore don't think of
it as a special place. So we went bar hopping in Harlem and later it
struck me how they had constantly burst out saying: "Wow, how wonderful
Americans are.... how open they are..... how loving, how hospitable they
are!"
Now, people are always a bit more open and warm in bars than
in other places, you know. But the main thing was, for these strangers
"Harlem" and "America" was one and the same thing - just a strange new
peculiar society. And they just loved the place right away because
people do seem to be more open in America in the eyes of Europeans. So
they just loved the place and didn't think of it as anything special........UNTIL
the next day up in that workshop in Smith College when the heard the
words of that white woman from Iowa who described what happened to her
when she walked into Harlem. And they immediately realized what a
TERRIBLE place they had been the night before......in the sick white
American mind.
So what I am saying is that if you have not been oppressed by all these
messages you can have an easy time in Harlem and love it and feel as
good as any place on Earth. But if you have gone through all these
messages about black people in your upbringing, you are paralized. You
loose your freedom of movement. And that paralizis itself is going to
send signals out to blacks that will trigger their anger and hostility
patterns. So there is a Catch 22 here. We have to understand that. We
are constantly creating their anger and their crime.
It is so obviuous to see in South Africa.
For years blacks wanted freedom in that society, but whites did not want
to give it to them. Why? Because the crime rate is tremendous in black
South Africa and therefore whites would come to the conclusion and tell
each other that there is no way we can ever give those people
power to run our society. Well, What they just needed to do was to look
across the border to the independent black African nations in Zimbabwe
etc. and they would find that the crime rate there comparatively was
much lower than South African black crime. So there is a clear
correlation between oppression and the level of crime you have in a
society. Right now you have to lock up more people behind bars in
America than any other society on earth per capita.
I think it might be
fair to say that you can measure the level of oppression in a soecity
through the extent you have to lock up people in that society. It is not
popular these days to talk about political prisoners and it might also
be too emotional a statement, but to some degree I would say that that
is an expression you could use to describe the situation in America. One
reason it is wrong is that it sounds like I am taking away
responsibility from people. I am not trying to do that. We do have
responsibilities. But when we see a whole group of people act out in
such patterns consistently, instead of locking up that group more and
more effectively, we must start looking at some of the causes behind
that factor. And that is what you are not doing in America right now. We
are ending up in more and more oppression.
Anyway, I have taken you on a journey
through some foreign countries here. And I would just like to talk about
one more foreign country, namely Northern Ireland, because there you see
it so clearly also. When I walked around in a Catholic ghetto in
Belfast, for the first time in my life I felt: "Wow, this is completely
the same gut feeling I have as when I walk around in a black ghetto in
the United States." What I saw was dirt and litter in the streets,
higher crime rates, high unemployment rates etc. So similar to the
American ghetto picture. But how do they discriminate in that society?
There are all white people. There is no way you can tell the difference
between them - the Protestants and the Catholics. Well, if they meet
each other - and that is getting harder and harder for them to do,
because they did not work on their oppression in time. Ten years there
were still integrated neighborhoods in Northern Ireland. Since then they
have been forced and bombed away from each other. But if they meet each
other on the bus, they will listen carefully to how this or that person
pronounces a "b" or an "a". And if it is pronounced this or that way he
or she must be coming from that neighborhood and be a Protestant or
Catholic. Well, we know that Protestants and Catholics can easily get
along in other societies, but in that society they can't. The minute
they hear that this person belongs to the other group, they can't get
along. As a result of all the messages they got about each other from
early childhood they loose their freedom to react in a healthy way to
each other.
So it is so evident and clear that we
are talking about oppression here - not race, not color or anything like
that - a type of oppression everybody all over the world can end up in.
It is just so important that we keep these things in mind when we talk
about these issues. So I brought you to some foreign countries to give
you a better understanding of how our system is working in
America and locking us all up. Any questions now?
- Well, I see now that there are no
simple solutions.....
- No, that is why I take you through
several hours of this. I sometimes get the question in the intermission
of my show: "So what is the solution?"
- But what can we really do?
Well, it is good that I didn't get that
question before now. That means you are serious about this. You are
willing to reach out for some higher awaremess before you feel you can
ask that question. But it is clear that we have all been deeply
mistreated in childhood and this shows itself in this Bell curve I drew
here. And therefore a quarter of Americans kids are now coming out of
high school functionally illiterate. So something is deffinitely wrong
here.
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